Sean Thomas Dougherty
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seanthomasd.bsky.social
Sean Thomas Dougherty
@seanthomasd.bsky.social
1.4K followers 750 following 420 posts
Poet. Recent books with BOA Editions, Jacar Press. I work as a Medtech and caregiver, and teach part-time in the Western Connecticut State U MFA Program. Disability rights advocate, father, husband, obsessive Cleveland Cavs fan.
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Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
irishali13.bsky.social
Poem for your Monday 🤍 a favorite.
~ Dr. Maya C. Popa - Reprise
—You were a child, and I will never have a child with you, that wasted tenderness where might have lived a world.
On earth, it will matter little that we met, our days like rivers at the mouth of a sea so cold, so quiet, so blue.
Reprise Oh, but I could mourn you all day long, the sky, a spool of undyed wool only you'd know what to make of. You once believed the moon pitch black, a flashlight pointed at refracting coal. You were a child, and I will never have a child with you, that wasted tenderness where might have lived a world. On earth, it will matter little that we met, our days like rivers at the mouth of a sea so cold, so quiet, so blue. MAYA C. POPA
January 12, 2026 at 12:33 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
What's happening is not new, it's a return to the old. They've been killing working folks in the streets for centuries.
workingclasshistory.com Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 3d
#OtD 12 Jan 1928 Clemente Chávez, a Mexican member of the @IWW union, was murdered during an attack by bosses' thugs in the Walsenburg, Colorado IWW union hall during a coal strike. A bystander, Salistino Martinez, was killed on the street outside stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8397...
January 12, 2026 at 1:46 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
I have a new brief labor essay in Wilkes University's River & South. It's a terrific issue including new work by Kimberly Gibson-Tran, and an essay that won't let go of me by Angela Townsend and much more.

riverandsouth.com/issues/issue...
Issue 16: Winter 2026 - River & South Review
yes
riverandsouth.com
January 11, 2026 at 4:05 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
This and they won. Remember all. We. The People. Won.
workingclasshistory.com Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 4d
#OtD 11 Jan 1912 the Bread & Roses strike of @IWW women textile workers in New England against pay cuts broke out. Within a week 20k were out. Despite savage repression they held out for 2 months and won all of their demands. Learn more about IWW women: workingclasshistory.com/2018/12/02/e...
January 11, 2026 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
workingclasshistory.com
#OtD 11 Jan 1912 the Bread & Roses strike of @IWW women textile workers in New England against pay cuts broke out. Within a week 20k were out. Despite savage repression they held out for 2 months and won all of their demands. Learn more about IWW women: workingclasshistory.com/2018/12/02/e...
January 11, 2026 at 3:55 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
This
sonyahuber.bsky.social Sonya Huber @sonyahuber.bsky.social · 4d
Christ, killed by cops, was asking for it because he was always saying stuff that upset people and should probably have just followed orders
January 11, 2026 at 2:07 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
A poet not to forget. MacArthur winner Irving Feldman of Buffalo, a luminous poem from his 1961 book. Feldman is still alive in active at 97 years old. Who are very old poets you have not forgotten?

"Some things catch the light

A moment, or more..."

www.justbuffalo.org/irving-feldm...
LIGHT by Irving Feldman - Just Buffalo Literary Center | Buffalo, NY
Read "LIGHT" by Irving Feldman - part of the Poem of the Week series, curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.
www.justbuffalo.org
January 11, 2026 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
emilyrinkema.bsky.social
What a gorgeous story by @kiklodge.bsky.social. The way it slowly layers on meaning--and the still life she builds around her x-ray...beautiful. There's a full world in this flash.
kiklodge.bsky.social Kik Lodge @kiklodge.bsky.social · 4d
Damn amazed to be part of this bumper issue of @frazzledlit.bsky.social. They are exceptional humans and editors and champions of barmy minds. Thank you!
There's still life
Flash fiction by Kik Lodge
www.frazzledlit.com
January 11, 2026 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
amorak.bsky.social
Leila Chatti, on @poetrydaily.bsky.social
I Went Out to Hear Leila Chatti The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats' wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. from the book WILDNESS BEFORE SOMETHING SUBLIME / Copper Canyon Press
January 6, 2026 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
topangahippie.bsky.social
Sending thanks to Diniz Borges for his close reading of “Good Tank Farms” as an Immigrant Landscape.
"The poet’s tank farms are more than industrial containers—they are the secular saints of a working-class America rarely rendered with such intimacy. " filamentosarteseletras.art/2026/01/02/a...
A Personal Reading: “Good Tank Farms” as an Immigrant Landscape
Millicent Borges Accardi’s poem enters me the way certain Central Valley mornings once did: through the smell before the light. That mixture of diesel warmth, dust, and something metallic—an aroma …
filamentosarteseletras.art
January 6, 2026 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
msjnba.bsky.social
There isn't a clear definition of what it takes to become a genuine championship-winning superstar, but there are hints of which challenges will prevent good players from reaching that level.

My latest for Y! Sports:

sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/...
Why Trae Young and flawed stars like him are so difficult to build around
With Young and the Hawks seemingly ready to part ways, let's look at some on-court reasons why the four-time All-Star's tenure in Atlanta could be soon coming to an end.
sports.yahoo.com
January 6, 2026 at 10:45 AM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
The new issue of Unbroken just dropped with a whole bunch of marvelous prose poems by folks such as Erika DeShay, Gary Finke, Howie Good, Nadja Maril, and Ozge Lena. I have one in there too.
www.theunjournals.com/unbroken48
Unbroken | Issue 48 | Winter 2026
Prose poems for y'all.
www.theunjournals.com
January 4, 2026 at 9:26 AM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
One of two prose pieces I have in the lastest fine issue of Broadkill Review
After Visiting Hours What is this grass as if the blades are strings that sing? I think this in the park outside the hospital. It is summer and the cicadas are whirring back and forth as dusk places her mauve tongue upon the trees. Soon the dark holds me, as I sit smoking on a bench. If I look I can see a window where you rest in a room hooked up to machines. A Junebug the shape of a cello lands on my arm, then departs—Helter skelters into the air, bumping into the streetlight and falling onto the sidewalk. I see the swarms of gnats in the streetlight’s halo and hear the soft hush of the moths. If I were to pray, there is no need to ask to enter the Temple. I am little more than an ember in the dark. We are so holy, small and frail.
December 30, 2025 at 6:56 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
biblioklept.org/2013/06/21/i...
“Insect Life of Florida” — Lynda Hull
“Insect Life of Florida” by Lynda Hull In those days I thought their endless thrum    was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.       In the throats of hibiscus and oleander…
biblioklept.org
December 30, 2025 at 12:05 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
The Glacier just dropped! I have a basketball poem alongside so many folks including Mary Lou Buschi, Dana Jaye Cadman, Christopher Citro, Victoria Chang, Cal Freeman, Peter Grandbois, Jennifer Moore, Dana Roeser, and Chase Twichell. Highly recommended reading.

theglacierjournal.com
The Glacier
Poetry for the Coming Ice Age
theglacierjournal.com
December 28, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
simeonberry.bsky.social
“I did not kill myself today. It was a Tuesday. And since you are reading this, neither did you. Neither of us were sent to war or had to hide in the basement.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty (@seanthomasd.bsky.social), “Poem Made of Fragments…” @boa-editions.bsky.social
POEM MADE OF FRAGMENTS WRITTEN ON VARIOUS PIECES OF PAPER—NAPKINS, SOCIAL WORK PAPERS, MED ORDER FORMS, THE BACK OF MED SUPPLY RECEIPTS, GAS RECEIPTS, AND SOME AFTER WAKING FROM DREAMS. I did not kill myself today. It was a Tuesday. And since you are reading this, neither did you. Neither of us were sent to war or had to hide in the basement. No one was standing under the streetlight at 3 AM. I tend to walk with my hood up, my head down. I tend to take my hood off if I see a cop. I tend to look away from bridges. The day the crocuses arrived I feel a part of me glanced up at the cardinal and flew away. Camus wrote, the moment that Sisyphus lets go of the stone, there is a moment he is free. But I say why doesn’t he sit down? Why doesn’t he refuse to go on? Is there not a Union in the afterlife? No wonder when we die, they used to say, “He punched his clock.” During the Balkan wars, who was the cellist—I googled it!—Vedran Smailovic, who brought a chair to the square in Sarajevo, sat down during the siege, and played Adagio in G Minor. Death prefers the minor keys. Vedran Smailovic is still alive. He is still playing in concert halls, but behind the veil he is forever playing in the square as the snipers look into their sights. And here is the ghost girl running through the halls again. Where has she come from? There are moments it seems I cannot even spell my name. As if I myself have been disappeared. Then I return. Sean, I write on the form that says I watched over humans tonight, and no one died. Is everything I write about your absence? How it hovers above you when you bend your head to read. When I was a boy, I used to love to take apart old radios. Not to see how they worked but to see how they looked like a miniature city, with tiny streets, skyscrapers of tubes, bodegas of fuses. Once, years ago, I walked far out onto the ice, and when I was out far enough that the world was only sky and clouds and frozen lake, I sat down. There is no anniversary for this day. I drive past the abandoned farmhouses. I am the sadness of horses standing in the rain. I learned to love you the way one learns to love the emptiness of winter fields. I tried to put you away in a drawer full of lost things. I found you in the coffee grounds this morning. And in this way, the voices drift, labyrinthine. An emptiness like a cathedral in my chest. I ramble along the tracks, a bit wary, a bit weary, headed towards nowhere I can name. There is nothing here to translate, sentence by sentence on this earth we are bandaged or bound to grieve. I lay down in the park, drowsy in the afternoon light. I begin to disappear. Leaving behind the weight I’ve carried. If you were to try and find me, all you would see in the grass is the hollow my body made. Sean Thomas Dougherty
December 26, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
mrbullbull.bsky.social
"The fact he tells these stories tells me he wants to keep on breathing. He hasn’t given up yet. And when he sits outside staring at the sky, I see him gripping the wheel, turning down a back road, big wheels kicking up a hurricane of mud." @seanthomasd.bsky.social mrbullbull.com/newbull/flas...
December 22, 2025 at 9:22 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
OG Deportees
workingclasshistory.com Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 25d
#OtD 21 Dec 1919 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported from the US alongside 247 fellow worker activists, anarchists and radicals on board the SS Buford bound for Russia stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9360...
December 21, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
dintywmoore.bsky.social
"After the longest night, tomorrow we sing up the dawn. There is a rejoicing that, even in the darkest time, the sun is not vanquished" - Dacha Avelin
December 21, 2025 at 2:00 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
So glad to have a couple poems up at Richard Long's 2Rivers with all of these fine poets. Link in the comments:
December 21, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Sean Thomas Dougherty
nikkimwalls.bsky.social
For example. 4th book. Waterbaby (2021) Copper Canyon Press.
December 19, 2025 at 7:27 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
My "Al's Story" is Story of the Month up at Thirteen Bridges

" He looked perfectly balanced, a tripod of head, elbows bent and then his body leaning forward on the stool. Hell, he looked angelic. "

www.thirteenbridgesreview.com/december-202...
Sean Dougherty | December 25 Fiction | Thirteen Bridges
Al's Story Sean Dougherty Fiction December
www.thirteenbridgesreview.com
December 19, 2025 at 8:32 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
storysouth.com/stories/ball...
Ballad of the Old Pool Hustlers - storySouth
The old pool hustlers are gone, the real road pool players. How Many ghosts in those roadside honky tonks?.
storysouth.com
December 17, 2025 at 7:19 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
Big gratitude to Deirdre Fagan and crew for including my poem alongside work by all these fine folks in the brand new issue of Orange Blossom Review: Susan Demarest, Gary Duehr, Roy Bentley, Jen Hallaman, Wendy Wisner, Joemario Umana, Joanna Garbutt, Lisa K. Buchanan, and Kelsey Erin Shipman.
December 15, 2025 at 1:16 PM
seanthomasd.bsky.social
My poem from the new beautifully done Nixes Mate
December 9, 2025 at 8:44 PM